Can I get a hug? I am standing on 3641 Meter on a mountain in the Atlas. Yesterday we climbed Mt. Toubkal (the highest mountain in North Africa, 4167 m), and today we are doing a 4088 m. It is 6.30AM and we are already 1.5h on the way, the sun rises and the clear star night slowly fades away. It is so incredibly beautiful, it makes me a bit emotional. I can not believe I landed my first private contracting gig only 12h before flying to Marocko and going offline for a week, and at this sunrise moment it all hits me. Today we will climb 1000 meters, descent 2000 meters, hop in a bus back to Marrakesh and tomorrow I will be arriving in Stockholm and officially process all the paperwork to start my own company. 

Todays hike is tough, not only because I have yesterdays hightmeters already in my legs, also half the group did not join today and I am the slowest (together with 3 guides, a marathon runner and a professional adventurer). The hight is really hitting me hard and I want to rest after every 3 steps. It is steep and scary. I curse in all the languages I know. I put on Eurovision rave music and make it step by step to the top, this feels like a bigger achievement than the higher top yesterday, I am SO PROUD, and I do not even know the name of this damn mountain. *I google it now, it could have been Ouanoukrim.

Let's make an AB!

AB =a Swedish limited company

24h later I am on my friends sofa in Stockholm. OK. Let’s start this company, because next Monday I will officially start at my first client. The application to a AktieBolag (Swedish limited company) is not so hard, except for… the name. All I need to come up with is a name. Damn I had a whole week to come up with a name! And now my brain is mush, and chatGPT is giving me bad ideas, and nothing is good enough. Frustrated I close my computer and my friend says:
What about Expedition UX? You love doing expeditions, so it is very you, and its like a user journey right?   

There it is. Expedition UX. 

"What's in a name?" Shakespeare asked. Well, as it turns out: everything

And the more I think about it, the happier I am with the name:

Implementing UX into a company is an Expedition: 

When you plan an expedition, especially your first, most you see is the long route and the hight meters you need to do (except when you are Dutch like me, and you do not know about the hight meters, and then realised you forgot to take the hardest number into account), and it all seems impossible. Can one walk 100km trough rough terrain? 

And it’s the same when starting the user experience journey within a company. Can we get the whole company to think in a user centered way? That seems impossible. But with the right attitude, map and technique (moving stone by stone), I have succeeded more than once (and won awards). 

User Experience Research is an Expedition: 

Researching your user experience is hard, not only the research, but dealing with the results. You will hear things you do not want to hear, and you will say things like: “but it was not intended like that!”. 

This happens on expeditions as well, you hit bad weather, you loose the route, the bridge is broken. All not how the expedition was intended. But those hard moments are what make the journey. And these hese hard insights, which you of course did not intent, are the ones that help your product further and make a better user experience.

Owning my own company is an Expedition:

Many people have told me during the last years, Kim, you should really go freelance! You are too good to belong to one company. But it is scary to go freelance, where are my sales partners? I need to make my own website? But on the other hand, I already speak on conferences by myself, get invited to companies myself, there is so much I already do, let’s take that next step and take the leap, lets start an expedition! 

And that is how Expedition UX was born in the mountains of Marocco in the start of 2025. 

Many thanks to Martine, the expedition leader at Nunatak, who got me up that mountain (I might have said: "you do not let me turn around") and Theresa Palmqvist who gets 100% the credit for the name.

If your company is standing at the bottom of its own UX mountain, I'd love to help plan the route.